Is Neuroscience Unlocking the Doors to the Kingdom?
Is this a great time to be alive or what? Who is thinking this question? How is this sense of self generated? Are the thoughts of this self simply habits triggered by cues? How does the brain and all of those synaptic processes create an external and internal reality?
Ah, questions! Are there really any answers? Have you read these four books?
- The Social Animal by David Brooks
- Mindsight by Daniel Siegel
- Habit by Charles Duhigg
- The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger
Each of these books use information and insight from neuroscience and what we are learning about the brain, cognition and perception to open our eyes to who/what/when we/reality really is – or they at least give us a very interesting lens to look at enlightenment & awareness through.
Reading these books and the accumulated affect of them on my consciousness reminds me of “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson.
Here’s a quote from The Ego Tunnel:
Presence is a necessary condition for the conscious experience. If the brain could solve the One-World Problem but not the Now Problem, a world could not appear to you. In a deep sense, appearance is simply presence, and the subjective sense of temporal immediacy is the definition of an internal space of time.
Is it possible to transcend this subjective Now-ness, to escape the tunnel of presence?
Is that great, or what?
The debate over whether we are just a bunch of chemical & electrical reactions in the brain vs. are we something more subtle and eternal outside of space and time continues. For me, these books have just made things more exciting and mysterious – and that book on habit is actually a great owner’s manual on how to make those changes you always wished you could.
The Evolution of Consciousness & Enlightenment
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